Groundhog Day

If you had to be stuck in an endlessly repeating day, this one wouldn't be a bad one to do over and over. It was clear and not too cold on my run this morning, and I'll be home until tonight, when I'll get to go play Puccini for two and a half hours. It shouldn't be a bad day at all.

There's a rocket ship in my library, currently. We built it last night using Discovery Kids construction something-or-others. They're kind of like really big tinkertoys, and I think you're supposed to use them to make forts. They were a Christmas present (I don't remember who from) and we enforced J's hard to sell but wise policy of storing them until the middle of the bleak midwinter so that they would be fully appreciated and also break up the monotony of stuck-inside life. So far we've built an igloo, a schoolhouse, and now the rocket. At James' direction we put a snowshaker (your guess is as good as mine) inside the rocket, and also a needle with an antenna ball at the top. You know, so the rocket can receive FM radio signals in space.

Every night when James goes to bed he asks that you put his cars up on his high shelf. He isn't allowed to take the cars to bed with him because he'll play with them (and talk to them) all night instead of sleeping. So Mater, Sally, and Lightning go up on his high shelf. Next to his piggy bank. Facing out. So he can see them. With Lightning next to Mater. But Lightning can't be next to Sally.

He's a little particular.

Last night I put a toy pterodactyl on top of Mater's roof. It started as a low note, and then ever so gradually rose to a broken wail. J went in.
"That dinosaur does NOT belong on Mater."
"Oh, he must have flown up there and sat on Mater's roof. I bet he likes it there."
"No, someone put him there. Take him OFF!"

The child doesn't take a joke very well.

Jung:
Because of my views I am accused of mysticism. I do not, however, hold myself responsible for the fact that man has, everywhere and always, spontaneously developed religious forms of expression, and that the human psyche from time immemorial has been shot through with religious feelings and ideas. Whoever cannot see this aspect of the human psyche is blind, and whoever chooses to explain it away, or to "enlighten" it away, has no sense of reality. Or should we see in the father-complex which shows itself in all the members of the Freudian school, and in its founder as well, convincing evidence of any release worth mentioning from the inexorable family situation? This father-complex, fantastically defended with such stubbornness and over-sensitivity, is a cloak for religiosity misunderstood; it is a mysticism expressed in terms of biology and the family relation. As for Freud's idea of the "super-ego," it is a furtive attempt to smuggle in his time-honoured image of Jehovah in the dress of psychological theory. When one does things like that, it is better to say so openly. For my part, I prefer to call things by the names under which they have always been known.

Completely trivial point from this paragraph: "stubbornness" is now a word I have realized has three pairs of duplicated letters. The only other word I knew like that off the top of my head was "bookkeeper." And that was from reading Encyclopedia Brown books twenty years ago.